disbarment

“The threat of disbarment and the loss of professional standing, professional reputation, and of livelihood are powerful forms of compulsion to make a lawyer relinquish the privilege [against self-incrimination]. That threat is indeed as powerful an instrument of compulsion as ‘the use of legal process to force from the lips of the accused individual the evidence necessary to convict him….’ As we recently stated in Miranda v. State of Arizona, ‘In this Court, the privilege has consistently been accorded a liberal construction.’ … We find no room in the privilege against self-incrimination for classifications of people so as to deny it to some and extend it to others. Lawyers are not excepted from the words ‘No person…shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself’; and we can imply no exception.” J. Douglas, Spevack v. Klein, 385 U.S. 511, 516 (1967).